MFM Library

The Month of Photography team starts publishing the annual series “The Library of the Month of Photography in Minsk”. The aim of the publication is to make the public acquainted with the activities and creative works of the Belarusian authors who played a significant part in enhancing the status of the Belarusian photography as an art form and its institutionalization in Belarus. The series aims at putting together the material database which would comprise documents archives, photographs and texts that describe different periods of the Belarusian photography history.

It is not by chance that the series’ first album is dedicated to the activities of Valery Lobko, an ideological inspirer of the “Minsk School of Photography”. In his creative preferences as an author he remained true to the Photography that happens at a specific moment of the photographer’s contact with the environment. “Do you remember as it is in Arbus’ diaries “I don’t press the shutter… The image does” – he used to say. Valery became a mediator between the photoclub movement of amateur photography in Minsk and the generation of the new author’s photography of the Minsk school. This qualitative shift from the amateurs’ expressive aesthetic shots to the creation of “a new critical language” (H. Eerikajnen) was primarily initiated by Lobko himself. The formation of the favourable creative environment and transferring of the photocraft were the matters of Valery Lobko’s concern. In his autobiographical text “Photography of Tomorrow” written a year before his death Lobko ponders over his place in the process of the birth of the Author of tomorrow’s Belarusian photography.

This album is an homage to Valery Lobko created mostly thanks to the efforts of Lobko’s students of different generations. The album includes the series of Lobko’s photographic works, revealing him as a master of the “double specialization”: portrait of-state (“Paliessie” section, series “Belarusian Ballet”, “Belarusian Climate”) and street photography (“Next Stop – Soviet” section). The photos are presented in the chronological order and accompanied by the quotations from “Photography of Tomorrow” essay.

The catalog was published in cooperation with the National History Museum of the Republic of Belarus, where the exhibition dedicated to the 135th anniversary of the birth of the photographer Leu Dashkevich and the poet Yanka Kupala.

Leŭ Urbanovič Daškievič (1882–1957) is the Belarusian photographer, writer, teacher, scientist, inventor. He was born on 12 February 1882, in Minsk in the noble family. Leŭ Daškievič graduated from the University in Dijon (Roman Department of the Philology Faculty) and the École nationale supérieure des arts et industries textiles in Paris (Photography Department).The photographer was engaged in teaching in a number of educational institutions of Yerevan (Armenia), Ganja (Azerbaijan), Tiflis (Georgia) and then Minsk. Leŭ Daškievič was the first who prepared and lectured the course on photography in Belarus (at Minsk Institute of People’s Education). In addition to his professional interest to photography Leŭ Daškievič did researches in the field of radiography and studied the effect of biological ultraviolet radiation on trophic and regeneration of tissues, which helped him eventually to develop a unique technique for accelerated wound healing.